Having mentioned Elizabeth Vandiver's book about the influence of the classics on the poets of the first world war in a previous post, I've now got my paws on a copy of her Stand in Trench, Achilles. Vandiver presents (inter plurima alia) a nice discussion of Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting, contextualising it as a version of Odysseus's descent to the Underworld – the episode known as the katabasis, in Odyssey book 11.

The katabasis is of course an immensely rich literary topos: Virgil had his hero visit the Underworld in Aeneid 6; there's the Ovidian version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice; there's Dante; there's The Harrowing of Hell in the York mystery plays. Philip Pullman's The Amber Skyglass has a wonderful katabasis, combining elements of Homer and Virgil (Will and Lyra's visit to the land of the dead). The richest recent reworking of the idea, though, must be the title poem of Seamus Heaney's collection District and Circle – in which the narrator descends to the Underground (or, as the case may be, the Underworld), via a Charon-figure manning the ticket booth. Like Aeneas, he glimpses his father ... It ends:

"And so by night and day to be transported Through galleried earth with them, the only relict Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward, Reflecting in a window mirror-backed By blasted weeping rock-walls. Flicker-lit."

But back to Owen. Here's Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escapedDown some profound dull tunnel, long since scoopedThrough granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and staredWith piteous recognition in fixed eyes,Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, -By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan."Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn.""None," said that other, "save the undone years,The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,Was my life also; I went hunting wildAfter the wildest beauty in the world,Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,But mocks the steady running of the hour,And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.For by my glee might many men have laughed,And of my weeping something had been left,Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,The pity of war, the pity war distilled.Now men will go content with what we spoiled,Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.Courage was mine, and I had mystery,Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:To miss the march of this retreating worldInto vain citadels that are not walled.Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.I would have poured my spirit without stintBut not through wounds; not on the cess of war.Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.I knew you in this dark: for so you frownedYesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.Let us sleep now ..."

"Long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined" – that's a reference to the titanomachy, the war between the Olympians and the older generation of gods. Zeus won; the Titans were chained up deep below the Earth. The "dark tunnel" here is both a first world war dug-out and the entrance to Tartarus. Then Owen meets the shade of "the enemy you killed". Their greeting – "'Strange friend," I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'/ 'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years, /The hopelessness'" – is referencing both the Iliad and the Odyssey. It recalls Diomedes's and Glaucus's moving conversation across the battle lines in the Iliad, in which the two warriors, on opposite sides in the conflict, talk and realise that their shared connections outweigh the immediate enmities of war. They swap armour, and part without violence. It also recalls the exchange between Odysseus and the ghost of Achilles in the Odyssey. ("Do not grieve, even though you are dead", says Odysseus, and Achilles replies, "Do not console me for death, shining Odysseus.") The blood-clogged chariot-wheels are Iliadic, too (so are Achilles's chariot wheels described after his grotesque killing spree) and the wells clearly recall the springs in which the Trojan women used to wash their clothes before the war (described amid one of the most famously evocative passages in the Iliad, in which Achilles chases Hector round and round the walls of Troy before slaughtering him). Wonderful stuff.